1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to communications and billing systems; and more particularly, to authorizing and billing communications services over a standard bank card financial network.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In the telephone industry today, billing communications services requires extensive post processing by large billing systems. Typically, volumes of information records are generated by communications equipment and are collected. These records are then reformatted and passed to a batch system for back office processing. These back end systems do not provide any real-time indication of whether the customer has available funds to pay for the use of the requested communications service. Moreover, provisioning of new communications services typically requires expensive and sometimes extensive modifications to these back end billing systems. Additionally, modifications to these back end billing systems cannot be performed in a timely manner for dynamically providing new communications service as demanded by customer. Therefore, a new system for authorizing and billing communications services is desired.